In a highly provocative statement — one that was most likely well planned — United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in an interview this week to the New York Times that “Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.”

Responses to this statement were quick to pop up, with the Israeli “Left” condemning and the Right expressing their agreement. Public Security and Strategic Affairs Minister Gil’ad Erdan said:

The Trump administration’s view, which was expressed by Ambassador Friedman, is the only one that might bring about change and make the Palestinians understand that boycotting Israel and the United States and supporting terror and incitement won’t achieve anything.”

In a TV interview on June 2, on the news docuseries "Axios" on the HBO channel, Jared Kushner opened up regarding many issues, in which his "Deal of the Century" was a prime focus.

The major revelation made by Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, was least surprising. Kushner believes that Palestinians are not capable of governing themselves.

Not surprising, because Kushner thinks he is capable of arranging the future of the Palestinian people without the inclusion of the Palestinian leadership. He has been pushing his so-called "Deal of the Century" relentlessly, while including in his various meets and conferences countries such as Poland, Brazil and Croatia, but not Palestine.

Indeed, this is what transpired at the Warsaw conference on "peace and security" in the Middle East. The same charade, also led by Kushner, is expected to be rebooted in Bahrain on June 25.

Israeli troops exchanged fire with Palestinian security forces in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday in a rare shootout which the army said was down to a case of mistaken identity.

The Palestinian governor of Nablus, Ibrahim Ramadan, said that two members of the Palestinian security forces were lightly wounded in the incident in the early hours of the morning adjacent to their headquarters.

He told reporters the Israelis said they came under fire first and then responded by shooting at the headquarters building, but questioned why they were there in the first place.

"Where is the headquarters? It is in central Nablus," he said outside the facility, where a number of windows were shattered.

Last week members of Quebec Movement for Peace disrupted a speech by Irwin Cotler on “Canada as a Human Rights leader” (at the last-minute ‘deputy’ foreign minister, Rob Oliphant, canceled his participation).

With “Free Palestine” signs in hand, filmmaker Malcolm Guy and I took the stage to denounce Cotler’s anti-Palestinian positions and support for intervention in Venezuela and Iran.

After we were ushered off the stage lawyer Dimitri Lascaris rose to interrogate the supposed human rights activist for refusing to criticize injustices inflicted upon Palestinians. Part of the way through Lascaris’ grilling a handful of us at the back of the room began chanting “Cotler, Cotler, you will see Palestine will be free”, as one can hear in this video viewed over 10,000 times.

In an article on Telesur as far back as December 2017 reporters cited Glenn Greenwald’s observation that an increase in Israeli military repression of Palestinian citizens was joined by what Greenwald called a “censorship rampage” designed to delete as many Palestinian accounts as possible.

In a more recent article titled “Censored and Surveilled,” the authors asked if social media is a “safe space” for Palestinians, given the likelihood that you might get arrested and charged with “incitement” for writing something that the Israeli government does not like.

What makes the case of Dr. Rima Najjar’s banning from Quora different? It’s different because she is fighting back not just for her right to free speech, but for the voices of all Palestinians silenced by what Telesur calls “social media imperialism.”

Israel’s 10-meter high separation barrier and the country’s decades of indoctrination have blocked its view and allowed Israelis to simply stop seeing real live Palestinians?—?decidedly alive, even if not well, and determined to live normal lives.

“Extreme injustice”
To give some perspective to the ordeal endured by Ashqar, in 2007, Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury about the disclosure of the identity of a CIA agent.

Libby was sentenced to two and a half years, but didn’t spend a day in prison because President George W. Bush commuted his sentence.

Last year, President Donald Trump pardoned Libby altogether.

Ashqar, who wasn’t accused of perjury but of simply refusing to testify, spent more than a decade in prison.

Michael Deutsch, Muhammad Salah’s lawyer during the trial of Ashqar and Salah, wrote for The Electronic Intifada in 2008 about the “extreme injustice perpetrated on Abdelhaleem Ashqar by the US government and the federal court in Chicago culminating in a draconian sentence of 135 months for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

Your government, ever abasing itself, answering the "siren call" of the alleged Israeli "justice System"; had the Israelis ever gotten hold of this man, he'd be dead by now.

Hundreds of Jewish settlers on Sunday forced their way into East Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, according to Jerusalem’s Religious Endowments Authority.

“Israeli police shut the compound’s Al-Mugharbah Gate after allowing 334 settlers through it into the site,” the Jordan-run authority tasked with overseeing the city’s Muslim and Christian holy sites, said in a statement.

Last week, a settler tour inside the flashpoint site during the final day of the fasting month of Ramadan triggered clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers.

The US ambassador to Israel did not rule out an Israeli move to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, land that the Palestinians seek for a state, in an interview with the New York Times published on Saturday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the run-up to an April election that he plans to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a move bound to trigger widespread international condemnation and complicate peace efforts.

A Reuters report of the interview said that US Ambassador David Friedman had declined to say how Washington would respond to annexation, but remarked:

We really don’t have a view until we understand how much, on what terms, why does it make sense, why is it good for Israel, why is it good for the region, why does it not create more problems than it solves.

These are all things that we’d want to understand, and I don’t want to prejudge…

A video has been released showing a group of masked Israeli settlers attacking a Palestinian home in the West Bank village of Kufr Yasuf, prompting Israel Police and Israeli army to launch an investigation.

The video – which was released by Israeli human rights NGO Yesh Din – shows a group of 15 illegal Israeli settlers approaching a Palestinian home in Kufr Yasuf, off Route 60 in the occupied West Bank. All are wearing balaclavas and hooded jackets, disguising their faces from the CCTV camera which captured the event yesterday.

According to an investigation by Yesh Din: “the settlers entered the village from the direction of Tapuah outpost [Za’tara]. They threw rocks and cement blocks at the family’s home while they were inside, breaking its windows, as well as the family car’s windshield, which they tried to set on fire.”

Meanwhile, Israel's military intel chief said Hamas 'has no interest in going to war at this time'

The Gaza Strip's militant factions on Wednesday warned that Israel's "foot-dragging" in following through with certain ceasefire arrangement could lead to an escalation beginning with border protests later this week.

"We insist on holding our Eid in the locations of Jihad, the bond to the land and the marches of return, to communicate to the people of the world that the people of Palestine, and the people of Gaza, will not break and their determination will not break," Senior Hamas official in Gaza Khalil Al-Hayya said Wednesday, on the first day of the three-day Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr.

A top member of the committee organizing the weekly "Great March of Return" protests on Gaza's border with Israel told Haaretz daily that Palestinians are demanding more aid be transferred from Qatar, further loosening of import restrictions, and continuation of humanitarian initiatives.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Any attempt to make these Palestinians give up their hopes for true nationhood for money, or other economic opportunities, is doomed to do have a "mammary glands up" outcome.

And to make matters worse, the Israeli government is creating settlements which prohibit, by the way they are engineered, any contiguous areas for a country of Palestine

In classical racist literature and discourse, black/brown natives are portrayed as lazy groups who cannot run their own affairs; they belong to backward entities that clash with other modern entities. The best intentions of these nations amount in the end to nothing, and whatever they have is brought about by the powers of illusion and Western intervention. The racist ideology of colonialism justifies the occupation of other lands, and then defends the so-called human face of Western colonialism, in general, and Israeli settler colonialism, in particular.

The Trump administration’s often delayed and much hyped “deal of the century” to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace may never see the light of day thanks to the chaos into which Israeli politics has been plunged following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition and the subsequent decision by the Knesset to dissolve itself and hold new elections in the fall.

No serious analyst gave the plan a snowball’s chance even in the absence of concrete details about its content. As presidential adviser Jared Kushner made clear in remarks last month to the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the plan revolves around contenting Palestinians with economic betterment while denying them their political rights under perpetual Israeli domination.

Speaking at the commencement of the College of Arts & Sciences, graduation speaker Steven Thrasher’s bravely commended NYU students and departments who have stood up to the string of Israeli massacres and Israeli racism against Palestinians generally: “I am so proud, so proud of NYU’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace … and of the NYU student government and of my colleagues in the department of social and cultural analysis for supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the apartheid state government in Israel.”

Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi has condemned Israeli plans to build new settlement units in occupied Jerusalem. In a series of tweets published on Tuesday, Safadi denounced the move as “a violation of international law” and called on the world to “act against Israeli illegal measures”.

In fact, she had spent most of the past month alone in hospitals in Jerusalem, separated from her parents and other relatives by the Israeli permit system that controls the movement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Only when treatment failed and she was no longer conscious was she sent back to her family in Gaza.

Aisha Lulu of the Bureij Refugee Camp in Gaza had been diagnosed with brain cancer in April. She had been having headaches and vomiting attacks since March and doctors found a brain tumor on 7 April.

With no specialist doctors in Gaza and in view of her age, Aisha was granted a permit by the Israeli military authorities to allow her to attend al-Makassed, a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Wow, HOW BUTCH must that Israeli bureaucrat, who denied this kid the right to have a family member with her, must be feeling right now; they are probably, on top of the moon!!

Not letting kids have family around them, when they are ill or dying, or not getting Palestinian people care in time to get well, are all part and parcel, of Israel's "Final Solution" for the Palestinians.

The Israeli government is working to “prevent the Senate from passing a bipartisan resolution endorsing a two-state solution”, according to a report in Axios.

Drafted by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, the resolution is expected to be tabled soon. “As a bipartisan measure backed by a close Trump ally like Graham,” Axios noted, it “would be expected to win a substantial majority.”

Citing unnamed Israeli officials and congressional staffers, the report claimed that Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, and other Israeli embassy officials “have been lobbying Graham and Van Hollen to remove the words ‘two-state solution’ from the text”.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday laid a wreath at the tomb of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Eid Al-Fitr.

The Wafa news agency reported Abbas saying: “We ask God that Eid would return to us when we liberate our country, establish our independent Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as its capital, and overcome all conspiracies against our cause, including the deal of the century and others. All of the conspiracies will go to hell, and our people will remain steadfast on their land in the face of all these.”

Last month the US announced that it would be rolling out the first stage of it’s Middle East peace plan dubbed the ‘deal of the century’ in an economic forum in Bahrain. The “Peace to Prosperity” conference aims to encourage “investment in the Palestinian territories” ahead of the revelation of further details of the peace plan.

The data provided by WHO make for harrowing reading. But the report sanitizes the fact that this body-breaking and traumatizing violence is by Israeli policy and design.

Any effective treatment must correctly diagnose the cause and not just the symptoms.

In the year following the launch of the Great March of Return, more than 28,000 Palestinians in Gaza were injured and 277 killed, including 52 children, most of them slain during unarmed, mass protests along Gaza’s eastern and northern perimeter.

Despite the civilian nature of the protests, as was affirmed by a panel of UN investigators, WHO says the deaths and injuries happened “as a result of clashes with Israeli security forces.”

That is a gross mischaracterization of Israel’s use of force against peaceful and unarmed protesters, officially sanctioned by shoot-to-kill or maim orders against civilians who pose no plausible threat, even when they are children.

Former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler was on stage as one of several “inspiring thought leaders” talking about “pressing human rights issues” at Montreal’s Concordia University on Monday.

But one issue the chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights was in no hurry to talk about is Israel’s massive and systematic violations of Palestinian rights.

Cotler was the focus of a disruption that sought to raise the question of Palestine in a place where members of Canada’s liberal elite preferred silence.

As the video above shows, lawyer and activist Dimitri Lascaris jumps up on the stage and challenges Cotler directly, pointing out how Israeli snipers have deliberately killed journalists, medics and unarmed protesters during Great March of Return protests in Gaza over the last year.

Ramzy Baroud, author of ‘The Last Earth’ and editor of the Palestine Chronicle, wrote a commentary posing the question “if access to clean water is a human right, why is Palestine the exception?”

Baroud cites the 2010 UN General Assembly resolution, 64/292 recognizing “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”

Baroud proclaims that “it all makes perfect sense. There can be no life without water. However, like every other human right, it seems, the Palestinians are denied this one too.”

He recognizes the water crisis affecting the whole world, but says the “situation is more complicated in Palestine, where the water crisis is directly related to the political context of Israel’s occupation: apartheid, illegal Jewish settlements, siege and war.”

The study was prepared by scholars from Ben-Gurion University and Tel Aviv University for the environmental organisation EcoPeace Middle East, and was presented Monday at the annual Conference of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians and Schools of Public Health.

One upshot of the reduced electricity supply to the blockaded territory “is that sewage plants aren’t operational and thus 70 percent of Gaza’s untreated sewage goes straight into the sea”.

In the latest round of Israeli aggression on Gaza in early May, the Palestinian resistance factions, specifically Hamas, relied more on its media and propaganda system. They took video footage of their armed operations and produced short films, using inflammatory language directed at the Palestinians to make them more supportive of the group and directed at the Israelis in Hebrew for intimidation and deterrence.

Trump’s gifts to the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu of the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel and of the whole of Israeli-occupied Jerusalem gave an enormous boost of adrenaline to all non-state actors and resistance movements in the Middle East. These groups, who enjoy financial and military support from Iran, are united not only against US hegemony but have also effectively linked themselves and their struggle to form a united front against the US and Israel. This new unity is evident from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon to Palestine.

Webmaster's Commentary:

While I abhor all violence, what we saw against the Saudi oil ships, done by houthi rebels, may well be what the West may start to experience, intensely, courtesy of its general duplicity on the issue of Palestinian statehood, and its "manufactured" arguments with Iran, where its only "crime" has been refusing to sell its oil only in US dollars.

And I think that President Kennedy said it first, and said it best: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Something upon which the Foggy Bottomites; Tel Aviv; and Saudi Arabia, really need to be reflecting right now.

Secretary of State Pompeo was in Sochi on 14 May for talks with his counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. And in his opening address, Lavrov observed: “I believe it’s time to start building a new, more responsible and constructive matrix of how we see each other. We are ready to do so, of course, if our US partners are interested in doing so as well … The fact that we are meeting for the second time in the past two weeks inspires certain optimism. Let’s give it a try and see what happens”.

President Putin subsequently hosted Pompeo for a short discussion, noting: “I got the impression that the President [Trump] is in favour of restoring Russia-US ties and contacts – and of resolving issues of mutual interest. For our part, we have said many times, that we would also like to restore relations on a full scale”.

It all started when Jews were controversially allowed entrance to the compound to celebrate Jerusalem Day which marks Israeli control over the Old City in the aftermath of the June 1967 Six-Day War. In response to reports that Jewish entrance was imminent, Palestinians began to riot, which included throwing stones, chairs, and objects at entering police.

Multiple reports noted the incident marked the first time in about three decades that Jews were allowed access to the compound during the final days of the month of Ramadan, which was likely the result of Israeli authorities feeling emboldened by the US formal recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital last year.

Every year during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities approve a package to “relax” the restrictions on movement for West Bank Palestinians. This standard military practice aims, as authorities say, to facilitate Palestinian worshippers’ trips to Jerusalem for the weekly prayer that takes place every Friday.

This year, Israeli authorities announced that Palestinian men over 40 years old, boys under 16, and women of all ages could cross to Jerusalem from three West Bank checkpoints without military permits on the four Fridays of the month. However, married men between 30 and 40 became eligible to apply for military permits, which are valid every day during the month except for Friday and Saturday.

Israeli settler leaders are campaigning to prevent McDonald’s from opening a branch in Ben-Gurion Airport, claiming that the global restaurant chain unofficially boycotts West Bank settlements.

According to the report in Ynet, settlers want to prevent McDonald’s from “participating in a government tender for the duty free hall” at the international airport.

In a letter to the finance and transportation ministers, Yossi Dagan, head of the so-called Samaria Regional Council, claimed that McDonald’s Israel has continuously refused to open any branches in settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry is urging a boycott of a physics competition in Tel Aviv in July.

George P. Smith and 19 other scientists signed an open letter last week that calls on “all students and mentors from all over the world not to participate in the next International Physics Olympiad in Israel and to stand for human rights of the young Palestinian pupils and students, including their right to education.”

Smith, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Missouri, won last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for his invention of a process to evolve proteins that can be used to develop new medicines.

The Glorious Holy Month of Ramadan will come to an end tonight at sundown … ushering in the wonderful feast days of Eid-al-Fitr. A time for joyous celebrations with families, a time to feel completely renewed and refreshed.
*
That’s how it’s spelled out in the books…
*
Unfortunately in Palestine the book is written differently… families are divided, family members are denied entry to join in the celebrations, families are mourning their loved ones killed by Israeli forces.

Bahrain is gearing up to host the economic version of the so-called Deal of the Century. A two-day conference, co-hosted by the United States, is scheduled to be held in the capital, Manama June 25-26.

The Palestinian leadership has rightly refused to take part in the latest US-Arab charade, which aims at normalizing Arab-Israeli ties at the expense of Palestinian rights.

Despite the fact that some have tried to present the Bahrain ‘workshop’ as a purely ‘economic effort,’ White House officials have been clear that this is the first stage in their supposed peace plan.

For the Trump administration, the Manama meeting serves as the first step in a larger strategy that aims to undermine international law regarding Palestine and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has blamed Israel for all possible repercussions of the attack by its soldiers and settlers on Al-Aqsa Mosque and the worshippers within.

“The Israeli occupation must bear the responsibility for the repercussions of its violations at Al-Aqsa Mosque that led to a wave of protests in which the Palestinian people voiced their anger over Israeli measures at the Noble Sanctuary,” said Hamas. “The ongoing assault and raids on Al-Aqsa by Israeli occupation forces and settlers will only make the Palestinian people more determined to defend the mosque and preserve its sanctity.”

Twenty-five years ago, I moderated the panel discussion on the Palestinian economy at the international economic summit in Casablanca, Morocco. I was there in my capacity as co-chair of Builders for Peace (BfP), a project created by Vice-President Al Gore to help grow the Palestinian economy in support of the still-fledgling Oslo peace process.

I learned a great deal both at the Casablanca Summit and in my more than three years with BfP and it is from that vantage point that I want to comment on the Trump Administration’s proposal to sponsor an economic “workshop” in Bahrain.

Israeli soldiers killed, Friday, a Palestinian child near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, and injured a young man from Hebron, while [they were] trying to enter Jerusalem for Friday prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Media sources said the soldiers shot and killed Abdullah Luay Gheith, 16, from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, after opening fire at him and several other Palestinians who were trying to enter Jerusalem from Wad Abu al-Hummus area, near the villages of al-Khas and an-No‘man, east of Bethlehem.[by climbing the border fence, acc. to Reuters]. The slain Palestinian child was shot with a live Israeli army round in his heart, and died instantly after the soldiers shot him.

In a speech commemorating the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will never leave those areas. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, the Arab residents of these territories have lived under a military occupation, with no representation in the Israeli government.

Netanyahu praised President Trump twice during his speech, once for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and again for recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. He said recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights was a “good and important start.”

Some see Trump recognizing the Golan Heights as a part of Israel as a precursor to him recognizing the rest of the territories occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War. Netanyahu does know how to play to Trump’s ego, recently promising to name a settlement in the Golan Heights after him.

The European Union on Friday criticised Israel over plans to sell aid given to Bedouin villages in the occupied West Bank which was seized by Israeli authorities.

The tents and other humanitarian structures will be put up for auction within days by COGAT, the Israel defence ministry unit which oversees civilian activities in the Palestinian territories, according to the EU's spokesman in Jerusalem.

The supplies include "two school structures that had been consigned to Ibziq community; and two tents and three metal sheds to the al-Hadidiya community", Shadi Othman said in a statement.

Thirty Palestinians were killed in the context of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the month of May.

Two of those killings took place in the West Bank on the last day of the month.

Yusif Wajih Suheil, 18, was shot and killed by Israeli police in the Old City of Jerusalem after stabbing two persons, critically injuring a 50-year-old man.

Security camera footage released by Israeli police appears to show Suheil lunging at a man on a bicycle who is wearing Orthodox Jewish dress, then chasing after another man.

The edited compilation of footage also shows police firing at Suheil and him falling to the ground as he poses no apparent immediate life-threatening danger to others, suggesting that no attempt was made to detain Suheil or use non-lethal means to subdue him.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that the Palestinians deserve "self-determination," but stopped short of backing Palestinian statehood and expressed uncertainty over their ability to govern themselves.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The Palestinians were self-governing just fine before the Khazars showed up.

The European Union has condemned Israeli plans to build illegal housing units in occupied East Jerusalem.

The plans, which were announced on Wednesday by Israel's housing ministry, include the construction of 805 housing units in Jewish neighbourhoods in the city's east, which was occupied by Israel in 1967.

In a statement released Saturday, the EU said it is "strongly opposed to Israel's settlement policy, including in East Jerusalem, which is illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace".

"The policy of settlement construction and expansion in East Jerusalem continues to undermine the possibility of a viable two-state solution with Jerusalem as the future capital of both states, which is the only realistic way to achieve a just and lasting peace.

Apparently reporting on a war crime committed by Israel and providing a first hand account of the destruction and the anguish inflicted on Palestinian refugees is considered ‘hate speech’ according to the authoritarian social network.

This Frontline documentary was scheduled to be broadcast on PBS stations across the United States on May 14, 2019, but it was pulled at the last minute. The BBC, the co-producer, aired it in Britain.

We feel that Americans, whose tax dollars fund PBS, also have the right to see it in a timely fashion. Since the US gives Israel over $10 million per day, it is particularly important for American citizens to be fully informed about Israel's actions.

Frontline is the top in-depth news broadcast in the US: In an average week, more than 4.6 million people watch it. After numerous people complained about the cancellation, Frontline issued a statement saying it will broadcast the documentary sometime in the coming moths. It is not currently on its schedule.

A mid-August 2016 counterintelligence briefing for the Trump campaign did not specifically warn officials about Russian outreach to the Trump team, nor did it warn that two campaign aides, Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos, were already under FBI investigation, Fox News has learned.

The new details about the so-called “defensive briefing” have emerged from congressional letters, text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, and sources familiar with the matter. Such briefings are designed to warn the candidate and his team about national security threats.

“There was a defensive briefing of candidate Trump on Aug. 17 of 2016,” Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “And I can tell you what he wasn’t told: He wasn’t warned about a Russia investigation that Peter Strzok had opened 18 days earlier.”

If there’s any consensus to emerge from the political chaos in Israel, it’s that the Trump peace plan will get kicked down the road again for months, right into the U.S. election season, so it may disappear entirely. Several Israel observers say the plan is over.

Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, on twitter:

[T]he Trump peace plan – which I’ve been arguing was not going to see the light of day anyway – is now dead and buried. Bibi doesn’t want it anywhere near his campaign, and by September it becomes an electoral liability for Trump too

Former negotiator Aaron David Miller agrees, also on twitter:

There are only two positive aspects to the absurd spectacle of Israel — 7 weeks after holding elections -going to new ones: first there will be no immunity law or effort to undermine Israel’s Supreme Court; and second, if he’s smart, Kushner will shelve his peace plan.

One of the primary targets of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement over the past year was the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest that took place in Tel Aviv earlier in May. Despite the protests, the contest went ahead and, on the day, none of the acts scheduled to appear in the final pulled out.

Why, then, am I claiming that the BDS campaign actually succeeded? The short answer is media coverage. Even though it did not achieve the goal of totally isolating Eurovision Tel Aviv, or convincing the headline acts to pull out, the BDS campaign succeeded in raising a massive amount of awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people.

For a more detailed answer, it is necessary to understand the true goals and methods of the BDS movement. BDS is not an abstract exercise in moral purity; it is about winning concrete victories against Israeli oppression.

Jared Kushner’s visit to Jerusalem to promote his troubled Middle East peace plan appeared to abruptly lose its remaining energy after an overnight crisis in Israeli politics plunged the country into a months-long election campaign.

With no guarantees that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Trump-friendly government will stay in power past the summer, any progress made with Kushner – Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser – is at risk of being revoked by the next Israeli administration.

One month after Israelis voted in a national poll, Netanyahu failed to form a government by the deadline of midnight on Wednesday and chose to push parliament to disband rather than risk political foe Benny Gantz snatching the premiership from his grasp.

New elections are set for 17 September, and the next government may not take power until October or even later.

Israel is relying on US muscle to stop the International Criminal Court investigating alleged war crimes perpetrated in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The International Criminal Court in The Hague has no jurisdiction to discuss matters concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Sharon Afek, Israel’s military advocate general, stated at the annual Herzliya Conference, a high-profile gathering of Israel’s political and military elites, this week.

“Israel is a law-abiding country, with an independent and strong judicial system, and there is no reason for its actions to be scrutinized by the ICC,” Afek added.

The military advocate general’s office also recently published a report claiming that the military had conducted “lectures and workshops on the legal ramifications” of occupation forces’ actions, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz stated.

Jordan’s King Abdullah told U.S. President Donald Trump’s adviser Jared Kushner on Wednesday that a lasting Middle East peace can come only with the creation of a Palestinian state on land captured by Israel in a 1967 war and with East Jerusalem as its capital.

German diplomats recently visited the Gaza Strip and an Arab capital where Hamas leaders were present in an effort to broker a prisoner ?exchange deal between ?Israel and the Palestinian faction, i24news quoted Palestinian sources as saying.

According to the sources, Hamas insisted that all Palestinian prisoners previously released under the Shalit prisoners deal but who were later rearrested by Israel be released before any new talks could begin.

The same sources said Marwan Issa, commander of the Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, and Hamas chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, recently visited Cairo and discussed with Egyptian officials the ceasefire between Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip and Israel and the possibility of a prisoner exchange deal.

White House adviser Kushner, the chief architect of the ‘deal of the century,’ embarks on a tour in the region in order to rally support for a US-engineered conference in Bahrain next month, where the initial stage of the peace proposal is said to be unveiled

After the European elections, which clearly demonstrate that citizens are no longer prepared to vote for the “people’s parties”, but are protesting against the disrespect of the “people”, it is overdue to deal with this phenomenon. Right-wing parties across Europe have been given a terrible boost, not because they spread anti-Semitism, but because they know how to score with xenophobia and Islam hatred. In fact, the main problem is the right-wing radicalism and populist phrases-and-culture that have managed to get into parliaments and governments.

Palestinian school textbooks are once again under public scrutiny, this time after a report published by Israel’s Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) claimed that material was “more radical than previously published”. The EU has since confirmed that it will be funding an assessment to be carried out “by an independent and internationally recognised research institute.”

According to IMPACT-se, “This new curriculum deliberately omits any discussion of peace education or reference to any Jewish presence in Palestine before 1948.” EU Foreign Affairs Representative Federica Mogherini said that the study will identify “possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance in education.”

One thing caught my attention during the latest Israeli escalation in the Gaza Strip, which left dozens of Palestinians dead. It was a video message, in Arabic, by Israeli parliamentarian Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet. Dichter spent a life time torturing Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and assassinating many others, but used the video to offer “sincere” advice to the people of Gaza to rebel against Hamas rule and stop firing rockets at Israel.

In an attempt to blame the victims, he said that whatever misery the Palestinians are suffering from is the result of choosing war against Israel. According to him, in 1947, the UN offered them a partition plan, but they refused it and they chose to fight, and as a result they are now stifled in this tiny piece of land, the Gaza Strip. In his warped logic, they have only themselves to blame for their predicament; they gambled against the Zionist movement and lost.

Palestinian groups, Fatah, Hamas and others should not confine themselves to merely rejecting the Trump Administration’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’. Instead, they should use their resistance to the new American-Israeli plot as an opportunity to unify their ranks.

Leaked details of the ‘Deal of the Century’ confirm Palestinians’ worst fears: the ‘Deal’ is but a complete American acquiescence to the right-wing mentality that has ruled Israel for over a decade.

According to the Israeli daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, a demilitarised state, ‘New Palestine’ will be established on territorial fragments of the West Bank, as all illegal Jewish settlements would permanently become part of Israel. If Palestinians refuse to accept Washington’s diktats, according to the report, they will be punished through economic and political isolation.

Last year, Palestinian citizens of Israel suffered two major set-backs in their ongoing fight for equality. The first was the Nation-State Law, which basically turned non-Jews into second class citizens. The second, which is related to the first, was a slump in Palestinian and Arab representation within the Israeli Knesset (parliament).

For the 2 million Palestinians who make up almost 22 per cent of the population of Israel, discrimination and institutional racism has been a reality since the Nakba of 1948. Even though “the right to equality is not yet enshrined in law regarding most aspects of life,” no previous decree with constitutional status has relegated non-Jewish Israeli citizens to an inferior status resembling the apartheid laws in White-ruled South Africa rather than the equal rights and democracy celebrated in the West.

A US governor has blamed Palestinians for Israel's ongoing occupation of their land, just weeks before the United States plans to unveil the economic portion of its "deal of the century" peace plan.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a longtime supporter of Israel and a member of Donald Trump's Republican Party, made his comments during a trade delegation visit to Israel this week.

"If you look at this whole conflict, to me, the biggest problem has been that Palestinian Arabs have not recognised Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state," DeSantis said during a news briefing at the Hilton Tel Aviv on Monday morning.

One of the two Jewish settlers recently caught on video starting a fire in the occupied West Bank is an Israeli soldier, it has been revealed.

According to reports in the Israeli media, “the army knows the identity of the settler”, and “two security sources confirmed the details, saying that the soldier was on leave when the arson took place”.

The military said that “the Israel Police are expected to handle the incident”, while “the police said that they have yet to arrest the soldier”.

Israeli police officers had to be extracted by soldiers after a sustained attack Saturday by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

According to Haaretz, “dozens of extreme right-wing activists assaulted police” near the notorious Yitzhar settlement, with masked men throwing stones and other objects at police and their van, and puncturing the tires of two police vehicles. “No one was arrested”, Haaretz noted.

The police said that officers had been responding to reports of violence between settlers and Palestinians around an outpost called ‘Kippah Sruga’.

“While our force was leaving”, said the police statement, “dozens of masked men from the area arrived, throwing stones and objects at the policemen and their vehicles. Using knives, they slashed the tires of two vehicles, causing quite a lot of damage before fleeing the scene”.

Millions of Americans and Israelis have been raised on a steady diet of pro-Israeli propaganda know just one side of Middle East history: that of oppressed-but-feisty Jews fighting violent-and-treacherous Arabs. They think only Israelis bleed and only Palestinians make them.

This week Palestinians marched to Germany’s diplomatic offices in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Ramallah and in the besieged Gaza Strip to protest the German Bundestag’s recent resolution equating the BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.

The marchers in Ramallah on Wednesday delivered a letter signed by representatives of 200 Palestinian civil society groups condemning “in the strongest terms the German parliament’s resolution, which is based on outright lies.”

Israeli avocado growers have been banned from accessing their greenhouses in Jordan Valley settlements, the Israeli government announced this week. The decision was made after settlers set fire to fields belonging to Palestinian farmers in Asira al-Qibliya village last Friday, causing damage but no injuries.

Of course nothing in the above paragraph is true – except that Israelis from the notorious Yitzhar settlement did in fact set fire to fields in Burin and Asira al-Qibliya, villages near Nablus in the north of the occupied West Bank on Friday.

Every year, we send $3.8 billion directly to the Israeli military — no strings attached — and American companies make the tear gas and other weapons that Israel deploys against demonstrators. Washington makes sure that no Israeli officials, political or military, are ever held accountable at the United Nations for potential war crimes.

Crueler still, the Trump administration has cut off funding for the very UN refugee agency that staffs health clinics in Gaza, even as it funds the Israeli military that’s filling them with gunshot victims.

The protests, overwhelmingly nonviolent, continue — and the killing has continued too, week after week. Meanwhile, there are so many disabled kids in Gaza now that the beleaguered territory is setting up special sports leagues for them.

Israeli permit system prevents some parents from accompanying their sick children to hospitals outside of Gaza Strip.

Gaza City - Last month, five-year-old Aisha came home from nursery vomiting and saying she had a headache.

Her condition deteriorated, so her family took her to hospital, where, after undergoing medical checks, they had every parent's worst fear confirmed.

Aisha was diagnosed with brain cancer.

"The news hit me like a thunderbolt," Mona Lulu, Aisha's mother, told Al Jazeera from her home in the al-Bureij refugee camp.

Aisha underwent urgent surgery in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City but she needed a medical transfer to go to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in occupied East Jerusalem for further treatment.

But when it came time to decide which of her parents would go with her, the family found the decision was out of their hands.

"Her mother and I applied and we both were rejected," Aisha's father Wesam said.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Just when I think that the Israeli government cannot get any more putridly foul, it does something that amazes me, by its ability to go even lower.

The kid is 5, for heaven's sake; and that she has to go alone for these treatments?!?

If an afterlife exists, (which I believe does), there has to be a special place in hell for the Israeli bureaucrats who made this decision, with an absolutely tone-deaf response to the needs of a kid who needs treatment.

Shameful, Israel!!

I keep hoping that you will find a way to rise above this kind churlish pettiness, in these kinds of situations, but I keep getting clobbered, every time something like this happens, and it happens far too frequently.

The Trump administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan drew criticism at the United Nations Wednesday, with European and UN officials saying Palestinians should not be coerced into selling off rights to run their own country.

Addressing the UN’s top body in New York, Jason Greenblatt, the United States envoy on the Middle East, talked up a meeting about boosting the Palestinian economy in Bahrain next month that marks the start of a new US-led peace initiative.

The “Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop, to be held in Manama on June 25-26 and co-hosted with the US, has already been rebuffed by Palestinian officials and business leaders who want their political demands to be addressed in any solution to the decades-old conflict.

As the brutality of Israel’s systemic apartheid is being unveiled, human rights activists who speak up about Israel’s crimes against humanity become a target of political persecution. Berlin is currently witnessing a crackdown on freedom of expression as German authorities yield to Israeli government pressure to criminalize dissent. Whereas Berlin has positioned itself as the last bastion for Zionism over the past decades, activities to challenge it are of a growing concern for the authorities. Recent efforts to suppress such critical voices include the German Parliament’s anti-BDS Resolution as well as the violent arrests, deletion of video evidence and literally gagging of protesters at IsraelTag. These along with the revoking of Rasmea Odeh’s European visa and the cancellation of her public talk with poet Dareen Tatour, at the behest of the Israeli government only weeks earlier.

Palestinian officials are doubling down on their plans to boycott a US-led conference in Bahrain next month aimed at garnering regional support for President Donald Trump’s peace plan.

The White House announced Sunday that it will be co-hosting what it described as an “economic workshop” with the Gulf country, aimed at encouraging Arab economic investments in the Palestinian Territories, as part of the US strategy in the region.

The US administration will use the conference, which is set to take place June 25-26, to unveil the first part of Trump’s long-awaited “deal of the century,” which emphasizes “economic opportunities” for Palestinians over core political issues like the status of Jerusalem, control of borders, and the fate of refugees.

Several years ago, a student in my Israel-Palestine course approached me after class with a question. Why, he wanted to know, did I care so much about this subject?

The student liked my course, considered it fair-minded and had no complaints about the way I was teaching it. Though he didn’t share many of my critical views about Israel he understood and respected them. But why, he was wondering, did the subject so consume me? Why did my relationship to this history feel so intense, so visceral?

Had I been a staunch defender of Israel the student probably wouldn’t have found my emotional investment surprising. Especially since I was avowedly Jewish it would have seemed to him “normal” for me to be teaching a class extolling Zionism and Israel. But what could be driving a Jew to invest so much critical energy in the subject?

Mast is attempting to bring to a vote H.R.336, the companion bill to S.1, sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and passed by the Senate in February by a 77-23 vote. The bill, which authorizes military aid for Israel and Jordan and imposes additional sanctions on the Assad regime in Syria, also contains the controversial Combating BDS Act, a measure which failed to pass during the two previous congressional sessions.

The Combating BDS Act encourages states and local governments to pass laws prohibiting government contacts with anyone who does not sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath pledging not to boycott for Palestinian rights. Judges in Texas, Arizona, and Kansas have ruled these laws to be violations of the First Amendment and the American Civil Liberties Union called the bill “unconstitutional”.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report has described the chronic state of mental health in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), as a result of Israeli occupation and violence.

According to the WHO, mental ill health represents “one of the most significant public health challenges” in the oPt.

In the Gaza Strip in particular, “over half of conflict-affected children may be affected by post-traumatic stress disorder”, while “an estimated 210,000, or over one in 10, people suffer from severe or moderate mental health disorders in the Gaza Strip”.

Overall, the WHO stated, the oPt “has one of the highest burdens of adolescent mental disorders in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, made a very bold assertion during a debate in the Security Council recently. “Jewish rights to the land of Israel depends on four pillars,” he claimed. “This includes the Bible, history, legality and the pursuit of international peace and security.”

I don’t know what he meant by “legality and the pursuit of international peace” and, given Israel’s record of attacking its neighbours, I will refrain from giving credibility to his illusionary discourse by dissecting it. Suffice to ask if he really believes that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and regular military assaults on the civilians of the Gaza Strip are both legal and conducive to international peace?

Inspired by the tactics of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the BDS movement was founded by some 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005 with the aim of pressuring Israel to respect Palestinian rights and international law.

It explicitly calls for Israel to end its occupation of Arab lands conquered during the 1967 war; abolish all discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and respect the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as outlined in UN resolution 194.

Israel’s public face, sustained and propagated by a wealthy and powerful diaspora that has significant control over the media, insists that the country is the Middle East’s only true democracy, that is operates under a rule of law for all its citizens and that its army is the “most moral in the world.” All of those assertions are false. Israel’s government favors its Jewish citizens through laws and regulations that are defined by religion. It in fact now identifies itself legally as a Jewish state with Christians and Muslim citizens having second class status. Israel’s army, meanwhile, has committed numerous war crimes against largely unarmed civilian populations in the past seventy years, both in Lebanon and directed against the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza.

Germany’s decision to equate the boycott of Israel with anti-Semitism “violates international law”, “international legitimacy” and is “immoral”, the Boycott Campaign – Palestine said in a statement today.

“This immoral decision violates as well human rights, freedom of expression and the right of people to support the oppressed around the world,” the movement added.

BCP warned that this decision “will give immunity and strengthen the occupation and encourage it to continue to commit further crimes and apartheid acts against the Palestinian people.”

A Canadian court is hearing a lawsuit against a decision to allow wines made and manufactured in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be labelled “Product of Israel”.

According to a report in Middle East Eye, David Kattenburg, a Jewish-Canadian activist based in Winnipeg, has applied to the Federal Court of Canada for an order “declaring unlawful” the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) directive.

In 2017, the CFIA “ordered liquor stores across the province of Ontario to de-shelve two Israeli settlement wines that were being sold with the label ‘Product of Israel’”, before promptly reversing its stance after “widespread public pressure from pro-Israel groups in Canada”.

“What [the CFIA’s decision] amounts to is an acknowledgement and endorsement of Israel’s de facto annexation of the settlements,” Kattenburg told Middle East Eye earlier this month.

A public reading of the first-ever alphabet story book in the English language about Palestine has caused outrage among some American library patrons who claim that its contents are anti-Semitic. Now a literary event featuring the children’s book P is for Palestine and its author has been shelved until at least next month when the library’s board of trustees will hold a public meeting to consider rescheduling the event for the book written by Golbarg Bashi.

Bashi was due to read P is for Palestine during a children’s event at the Highland Park Public Library in New Jersey, but several residents complained. They allege that the 2017 self-published book is anti-Semitic and promotes violence. One local resident complained: “I is for Intifada — encouraging children to rise up any way they see fit to resist. Far from peaceful and far from appropriate.” She added that the prospect of the book’s author visiting her community to host the reading made her “feel unsafe”.

The air was thick with anxiety as Muna Awad stepped out of the taxi at the entrance to the Erez Crossing, her five-year-old daughter Aisha in tow.

Aisha was about to embark on a journey from the besieged Gaza Strip to occupied East Jerusalem for emergency medical treatment - and Muna was handing her young daughter over to a woman the family had never seen before to help facilitate her travel.

"I felt as if my soul was leaving my body," recalled Muna about being unable to travel with Aisha that day last month.

The five year old was diagnosed with brain cancer on 10 April.

The specialist hospital in Gaza that handles cancer patients told Muna it was ill-equipped to treat her daughter, and ordered her to be transferred to the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem for urgent care.

A Palestinian boy killed by Israeli occupation forces during protests in March was fatally injured by an explosive grenade, an investigation by the human rights group Al-Haq has found.

Adham Nidal Amara, 17, was directly injured in his face, killing him, as he took part in the rallies marking the one-year anniversary of the Great March of Return protests east of Gaza City on 30 March.

Two other teens, Tamer Hisham Abu al-Khair, 19, and Bilal Mahmoud Shaban Najjar, 16, were shot and killed by Israeli forces while protesting in Gaza that day. A fourth person, Faris Yusif Faris Abu Hijris, 26, succumbed to wounds sustained during the protests two days later.

Fatal and shameful, what took place last week in the German Bundestag.Indeed, one felt reminded of Reichstag times, when Jews were discriminated and marginalized in Germany. This time, however, all “democratic” parties together voted for a ban on the BDS movement. It strongly reminded of the “Enabling Act” of March 24, 1933, the official law for the relief of the people and the Reich. Only the SPD voted against it then. So how can you compare “Enabling Act” and the anti-BDS motion, which “resolutely” opposes the BDS movement and wants to fight anti-Semitism? One can, because both decisions are deliberately not “constitutional”. Does not our constitution clearly state the right to freedom of expression?

Bundestag resolution “authorizes” to anti-Semitism and disregard of human rights

Israeli Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel, today, headed a group of extremist Israeli settlers in a provocative tour of the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, in occupied Jerusalem.

Ariel and dozens of settlers toured the holy sit,e in groups, only hours after Israeli police forcibly evicted hundreds of Muslim worshippers from the holy site.

Similar tours by Israeli politicians and lawmakers, in the past, led to tensions and clashes between Israeli forces, on the one side, and Muslim worshipers and the Jordan-run Islamic Waqf personnel in charge of running the compound, on the other.

In addition to human rights, we speak of economic rights, too: our rights to our economic assets — land, water, natural gas wells, our Dead Sea and Mediterranean Sea shores, borders, and the like — and the ability to employ them within a Palestinian-defined economic development plan, free from Israeli or donor agendas. Dumping more humanitarian and developmental funds into Palestinian coffers will not solve the conflict.